The Book

In Blindspot, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore hidden biases that we all carry from a lifetime of experiences with social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality.

“Blindspot” is a metaphor to capture that portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. The authors use it to ask about the extent to which social groups – without our awareness...shape our likes and dislikes...Read More>>>

The Authors

Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald have been collaborating for more than 30 years to understand how minds operate in social contexts. Their special focus has been on the unconscious, automatic, less reflective aspects of the mind and the decisions humans make about themselves and others in society. Their analysis has centered on social categories of gender, race, age, class, sexuality, disability, religion, politics, nationality and the many other social groupings that mark modern societies.

Reactions

Matthew Hutson, The Washington Post

What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are? That seems to be the conclusion of the past few decades of social psychology research. Freud stuck a dagger in the comforting idea of complete, conscious self-awareness, but experimental findings suggest that not only do we not know ourselves, if we did, we might not invite ourselves over for dinner. This research takes Freud’s dagger into our vanity and twists it. One of the greatest sources of torque is what’s called the Implicit Association Test...